February 21, 2019

Some soap opera actor faked a hate crime. The crowd went bananas. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris stood on her hind legs to make a statement about it. John McWhorter said:

So why in the world would he fake something like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.

Racial politics today have become a kind of religion in which whites grapple with the original sin of privilege, converts tar questioners of the orthodoxy as “problematic” blasphemers, and everyone looks forward to a judgment day when America “comes to terms” with race. Smollett—if he really did stage the attack—would have been acting out the black-American component in this eschatological configuration, the role of victim as a form of status. We are, within this hierarchy, persecuted prophets, ever attesting to the harm that white racism does to us and pointing to a future context in which our persecutors will be redeemed of the sin of having leveled that harm upon us. We are noble in our suffering.

That's a lot of understanding of a lot of stupidity. A surplus of understanding.

I say this:

This is precisely the kind of story everybody needed to see, and that it is fake underscores the rabid obsession Americans have with exactly this kind of 'news'. I know the terms are overused, but could there possibly be a better example of confirmation bias and virtue signalling? Even commentary on the story falls into those buckets.

What is most telling, I think, is that it demonstrates public innumeracy and the press' willingness to cater to it. What actually happens in America is invisible to people who cannot or will not do the math. So all we have are dueling narratives in short attention span theater. Nobody is actually counting the dead because dead men tell no tales.

For me, it is simple. We have 15,000 murders per year 30,000 suicides and 70,000 fatal drug overdoses. People hate themselves more than they hate other people.

The symbol manipulation is at an all-time high. And this is what America gets for not using algebra every day.